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“I use ‘disruptive’ in both its good and bad connotations. Disruptive scientific and technological progress is not to me inherently good or inherently evil. But its arc is for us to shape. Technology’s progress is furthermore in my judgment unstoppable. But it is quite incorrect that it unfolds inexorably according to its own internal logic and the laws of nature.”

Five causes of collapse appear paramount: major episodes of climate change, crises-induced mass migrations, pandemics, dramatic advances in methods of warfare and transport, and human failings in crises including societal lack of resilience and the madness, incompetence, cultic focus, or ignorance of rulers.

Liberal democracy and capitalism have been the two commanding political and economic ideas of Western history since the 19th century. Now, however, the fate of these once-galvanizing global principles is increasingly uncertain.

In her new book, Not for the Faint of Heart, Ambassador Sherman takes readers inside the world of international diplomacy and into the mind of one of our most effective negotiators―often the only woman in the room. She discusses the core values that have shaped her approach to work and leadership: authenticity, effective use of power and persistence, acceptance of change, and commitment to the team. She shows why good work in her field is so hard to do, and how we can learn to apply core skills of diplomacy to the challenges in our own lives.

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the guns of World War I fell silent — and nearly 20 million people lay dead. Could such a conflict happen today? After more than seven decades without a shooting war between great powers, many Americans find the thought of the United States and a major adversary like China killing millions of one another’s citizens virtually inconceivable.

But when we say something is “inconceivable,” we should remember this: the realm of what is possible is not bound by what our limited minds can conceive. Today, the intensifying rivalry between a rising China and a ruling United States could lead to a war that neither side wants and that both know would be even more catastrophic than World War I.

Current gross indicators such as population and GDP are misleading in terms of a country’s relative power. Power can be calculated more accurately by subtracting a country’s liabilities from its assets.

Without overcoming their historical amnesia disorder about U.S. and British intelligence, citizens, scholars, and policy-makers cannot hope to understand the proper context for what secret agencies are doing today.

Bernard Gagnon / CC BY-SA 3.0

Paper
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Five causes of collapse appear paramount: major episodes of climate change, crises-induced mass migrations, pandemics, dramatic advances in methods of warfare and transport, and human failings in crises including societal lack of resilience and the madness, incompetence, cultic focus, or ignorance of rulers.

The rates of US economic growth and especially personal saving have been higher than previously believed, according to revised data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. But it's not all good news, because the largest economic imbalances remain unchanged.

Early in Richard Rhodes’s new book, “Energy: A Human History,” we hear of a prominent citizen using colorful language to lament the state of his polluted city and urge his government to shut down industry or move it elsewhere: “If there be a resemblance of hell upon earth, it is in this volcano [on] a foggy day.” Though this could easily apply to modern-day Beijing, the speaker here is John Evelyn, a wealthy horticulturalist and one of the founders of the scientific Royal Society of London — and he’s complaining about London in 1659.

The great Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote that “there can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.”

Billionaire founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Ray Dalio has taken it upon himself to break that mold by championing the use of history in the financial world.

Video
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Margaret Macmillan, Professor of History at the University of Toronto and affiliate with the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project, talks with Aroop Mukharji (@aroopmukharji) about how to identify good history, dead white man theory, and Canadian vs. U.S. donuts.

Audio
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Margaret MacMillan, Professor of History at the University of Toronto and affiliate with the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project, talks with Aroop Mukharji (@aroopmukharji) about how to identify good history, dead white man theory, and Canadian vs. U.S. donuts.

Disoriented in a historical re-play, as headlines would have it, that seems to have crammed the timeline from the Machtergreifung to the Truman Doctrine into a mere nine months, The New Republic called up prizewinning Cold War historian Arne Westad at Harvard Kennedy School to get his thoughts. Over the course of a short phone call, he offered his take on proxy conflicts, Putin’s motivations, and why Russia is in a weaker position than it may seem.